01 December 2010

Save the Children have what I think is a fantastic new ad campaign highlighting the importance of luck in determining life chances. Being born in the UK almost automatically guarantees you a position as one of the richest 15% of people on the planet (that is at the basic rate of unemployment benefit for 18 year olds, excluding additional benefits).

the policy-induced portion of the place premium in wages represents one of the largest remaining price distortions in any global market; is much larger than wage discrimination in spatially integrated markets; and makes labor mobility capable of reducing households’ poverty at the margin by much more than any known in situ intervention (Clemens, Montenegro and Pritchett).

People worry about the ethical implications of randomly allocating treatments in small research projects. Yet when people are randomly born in hopeless economies with tyrannical rulers, we do everything we can to prevent them escaping.

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About Me

I'm an economist, currently working as a Research Associate on Education at the Center for Global Development in Europe, and on a PhD at the University of Sussex. Before that I worked on policy as a civil servant and consultant in the UK and in Africa.

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Because the consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else. (Lucas 1988, On the Mechanics of Economic Development)

I'm an economist, currently working as a Research Associate focusing on education at the Center for Global Development in Europe, and a PhD in economics at the University of Sussex. I used to be an Economist in South Sudan, hence the silly subtitle. Roving Bandit is a reference to Mancur Olson, not because I think I'm some kind of badass.